Jeroen/Falk, Greetings. Thanks for your insights. I doubtlessly over-simplified the situation when offering a disciplinary comparison. Frequency and volume are bound to affect publication costs, and hence subscription costs. It is true that Humanities articles tend to be longer, though maybe this is off-set somewhat, for example, by the use of charts and images in Science articles. In my defense, especially as I hail from a small liberal arts college context, it may be small comfort to try to parse-out a subscription cost by saying, “Well look at how many more articles we get each year from this journal.” A journal that is too expensive is simply too expensive. Though certainly more precise, I’m not sure how many librarians base budget decisions on article counts.
Of course my main point still stands, and I think Falk reinforced it in part when alluding to the journal pricing website, and saying: "prices differences between commercial and non-commercial publishers are huge in all disciplines.” If the trend toward commercial acquisition of non-commercial journals continue, the result is going to be higher subscription prices within our disciplines. It is what we are seeing in Theological and Religious Studies. We must strenuously encourage societies and academic institutions not to sell-out their (our!) intellectual assets to commercial publishers. My other main point is the unsustainable rate of price increases for journal subscriptions over time, again, a factor that we witness with commercial publishers with far greater frequency than with non-commercial publishers. While societies will allow a subscription rate to remain flat or increase slowly over many years, a commercial publisher is sure to impose regular annual increases—as much as the market will bear. A commercial publisher sees absolutely no sense in this behavior that only suggests to them an under-valuing of a profitable intellectual property. It may make little or no business sense because the society (ideally) does not view its journal(s) as either a property or as a business. Rather, it is an expression of an intellectual mission—a medium of communication for the dissemination of knowledge. Have a great weekend! Gary F. Daught Omega Alpha | Open Access Advocate for open access academic publishing in religion and theology http://oaopenaccess.wordpress.com/ oa.openaccess at gmail dot com | @OAopenaccess On Jun 27, 2014, at 4:20 AM, goal-requ...@eprints.org wrote: > Gary, > > Not wanting to defend high price increases I do think that you should take > into account the number of papers published in the average journal in the > various fields and how this number develops over time. The typical humanities > journal may have 4-6 issues with 4-8 papers, so 16-48 papers per annum > whereas the typical chemistry journal may have 8-12 issues with 24-48 papers > resulting in 192-572 papers per annum. This partly explaines the big > interfield journal cost variety. > > I suspect that the pressure to publish and sheer growth of the number of > researchers has caused these numbers to rise over the past few years, also in > humanities. That also partly explaines the rising journal costs. So take a > per article view. Or academics should decide to write less and read and think > more ;-) > > Jeroen Bosman > Utrecht University Library > > …snip... > > True Jeroen, > > The very interesting database www.journalpricing.com shows the following > picture: > > 1. The share of journals run by non-profit publishers in HSS is similar to > most of STM disciplines, and the share of journals run by for-profit > publishers seems to be increasing in all disciplines. > 2. The prices differences between commercial and non-commercial publishers > are huge in all disciplines. > 3. Although the average price per journal is much higher in STM, the > difference disappears if one takes the price per article as a measure, even > if one can assumes that an article in the HSS are usually longer than in STM. > For example, the median journal price in the field of History was around $400 > last year and in Chemistry, that is the most expansive discipline of all, it > was $1.800. But the median price per article in a History journals was $21 > and in Chemical journals $13. The reason is quite simple. Chemical journals > publish on the average 10 times more articles per journal than History > journals. > > Best, > Falk
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